Playful Participatory Practices

This volume addresses the matter of participatory media practices as playful appropriations of media technology within current digital media cultures. It introduces case studies, concepts, and methodologies at a time when participation seems to be the general condition of media culture—a condition, one might be tempted to label post-participatory. Commonly understood as becoming involved in doing “something” or as taking part in “something”, in the context of media use, participation is commonly associated with a changing attitude of consumers towards the contents of media products.

This essay aims to exert some pressure on the concept of participation in game research and the commitments it often implies, so as to open up room for the sustained recognition of the participation of institutions in what games, as continuously unfolding processes, have become. I suggest that, in counterpoint to current and valuable interest in the user/player and their participation and agency, we should attend to institutions and their projects surrounding games, although without sliding into a simple oppositional characterization of the relationship between players and institutions. To illustrate this I sketch the cultural forms of ritual and game and how they are variously used by modern institutions. This focus on institutional involvement brings to the fore a vital issue: processes of legitimation. In their processual nature—that is, that they are always in the process of becoming, and exist only in their playing—games are always the subject of ongoing processes of legitimation, and to recognize this is to widen our view of participation. What kinds of approaches to playing a game, or outcomes that it can generate, are taken as legitimate (or illegitimate), by whom, and why? What role do institutions play in the establishment of legitimacy claims? In other words, alongside examining inscriptions and appropriations in and around games, this essay suggests that we add “legitimation” as an additional object of methodological consideration as we seek to understand games as participatory.

This paper discusses the value of a practice-based approach in video game research. It focuses on the practices of modding and how the related actions hold both a technical and an aesthetical quality that enables us to better understand how video games are constructed and what meanings they transport. The described engagement is centered around the Metal Gear Solid franchise and a specific community of practice that creates tools to manipulate the designed content of the game.

Digital Games are a genuine part of convergence culture because their structure can become the subject of participatory practices. This generates special needs on the side of the computer game industry to manage and steer the relationship to its customers. The article focuses on this relationship between the game industry and its customers and outlines it as a form of cooperation. A short archeology of so-called editor games serves as a starting point. Editor games refers to a specific software genre, in which the users are offered design possibilities within a relatively confined framework. The article continues by elaborating the limits and possibilities of co-creative practices afforded by these software programs in order to trace the changing material conditions of a participatory computer game culture as a whole. It shows that editor games act as mediators within a precarious relationship between the media industry and the consumers. The aim of this approach is to explore the role of editor games in initiating and maintaining cooperative relationships between the computer game industry and its customers.

This article argues that online video knowledge sharing economies centered on challenging  personal computer games like Minecraft are not gender neutral because the performative, social aspect of game building, as well as the time-consuming knowledge acquisition of game skills, are understood as a boys’ and men’s play prerogative. Over the days, months, and years spent playing, boys turn into men, into cadres of boy geeks and live streaming jocks, and these gendered identities have implications beyond games. Paradoxically, while modding and sandbox gaming are more democratic and participatory than unmodifiable commercial games because their content creations are largely player-driven, rather than industry controlled, these are the very games that usually require the largest investment of technical skills, leading to the absence of those who are undemocratically excluded from such geeky pleasures. Gamers rely on disposable leisure time and the help of friends who share game knowledge and immaterial play labor within digital ecologies like YouTube and Twitch. In both ecologies, in ecologies of heuristics, the how-to videos that are shared over YouTube, and in the more fraternal communities of Twitch performers and their subscribers, male friendship and collaboration is key. Although some crafters have fabricated amazing digital gizmos and play worlds, they have done so with knowledge gleaned through Minecraft’s ecology of tutorials, forums, add-ons and mods. I do however also discuss a few exceptions to this pattern such as young girl players’ YouTube videos, and women live-streamers on Twitch.

The goal of this is to argue that the concept of modding should be employed as a viable tool for the design and analysis of participatory theatre experiences. It situates a theoretical sociological framework of user participation and audience driven modification and negotiation as a guiding principle for devising such theatrical experiences. We illustrate our argument through a production that was created as part of the curriculum for digital media at the University of Performing Arts Ernst Busch in Berlin. We believe that the term ‘modding’—as used in academic video-game writing and in our own experience as former mod authors and mod users—adds important context to questions of ownership and to how we dissect power relationships when audiences start interacting on a stage. In addition, it is a viable addition to a critical theoretical framework that can be used to devise such participatory experiences. While our observations are based on our own creative practice, that of fellow theatre directors and the occasional case study as video game players, we will employ terms and concepts from symbolic interactionism and media studies to situate our argument. What follows is an argument that participatory production processes in video games have for the better part of two decades already transcended the seemingly insurmountable chasm between audience and artists. Modding provides a useful extension of a framework based on a thorough definition of play to discuss degrees of participation during the design process and when performing and observing a participatory play.

Computing increasingly takes place beyond the desktop, as humanity is being permanently surrounded by, and entangled with, technological infrastructure. Against the backdrop of these recent developments, echoing in the emergence of what geologist Peter K. Haff calls the “technosphere”, we are confronted with the necessity to reframe contemporary media technologies beyond the epistemic tradition of modernity. Established dichotomies such as nature/culture, subject/object and inside/outside increasingly fail to diagnose what it means to live in the current condition. Navigating through the possibilities of playful engagement in these media-saturated environments, I will argue for the notion of the “elemental” in media studies, in its first and foremost substance-based meaning, indicating an ecological understanding of technology. In negotiating these potentials, speculative artistic strategies make use of the properties of natural elements in experimental media-technological set ups. They allow for a playful attitude towards technology, e.g. by appropriating the messy characteristics of mud as an interactional device, through the attempt to establish contact with the mineral basis of technological artifacts or by applying the capacities of the soil to demonstrate alternative screen formats. In this sense, the paper serves as a proposal to re-evaluate the media phenomena of the twenty-first century in terms of a techno-ecological paradigm shift in media theory.

In the center of the following inquiry stands the structural coupling of play and prosume in very actual forms of Augmented Realities, AR and neurogames. The term prosumer is a portemonteau of the terms production and consumption and finds a correspondence in the technological features of augmentation in a mixed reality, where real world and virtual world elements converge. In Augmented reality games codes call up virtual information, which is usual displayed on everyday mobile technologies as smart phones or tablets. The very latest addition to this already established technosphere of mobile devices and play worlds are biometrical interfaces. Such interfaces, like wristbands, clocks or counters and sensors are embedded or extensions to the mobile gadgetry and ubiquitous computing devices of everyday use. The most spectacular kind of such interfaces are those that claim to measure the states of our very inner selves, brain interfaces. The convergence of play principles and neurointerfaces takes place in a multi layered world of virtual information superimposed to the everyday processes of self-measurement for health improvement and self-optimization. The augmented virtual worlds in health Apps are gamifying life routines, from eating, walking to sleeping. The corresponding interfaces, like wrist bands containing Gyro sensors for movement detection and EEG take our actual personal conditions into account, when productivity and consumer potential is measured. Most directly the required information is gained through the form of consumer neurointerfaces, which are entering the end user market since the last few years, offered by companies with poetically promising names such as Emotiv EPOC and Neurosky. The epistemic promise these interfaces give is to enhance life through better control of the self in playful ways—far beyond gamification play principles are deeply embedded into the use of such tools as social feature. This is crucial to spot here a new form of play produsage: the final product is the healthy and better self. Art games allow a controlled shaping of investigations as artistic research—in sciences.

Joseph Beuys’ social sculpture 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks), conceived and started at Documenta 7 1982, has been described as a “tree planting action” aimed to produce “Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung” (city forestation instead of city administration). It included a giant pile of seven thousand basalt rocks in a central square in the German city of Kassel, as a call to citizens to plant one of seven thousand trees. Each time a tree was planted one of the basalt stone markers was placed next to it. Over the course of five years all 7000 trees were eventually planted and many remain in Kassel to this day.